


Trespasses

by Querulousgawks



Category: Veronica Mars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Friends to Lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-16
Updated: 2014-12-16
Packaged: 2018-03-01 17:27:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2781599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Querulousgawks/pseuds/Querulousgawks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>We met in church,</em> she told Weevil. It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t this, the whole truth: his back had been in view for as long as she could remember.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trespasses

**Author's Note:**

> Molly/Felix ficlets I rough-drafted on Tumblr and polished up for posting here.

The year Molly turns seven, she learns to catch the paper footballs that Gus Toombs flicks over his shoulder during Mass, right between the searchlight sweep of her uncle’s gaze, so all he ever sees is her jumping without cause. The first one she sends flying back hits not Gus but Felix dead center in the back of his neck, jolting his whole body forward and sending guilty triumph down to her toes. Both brothers spin to face her, Gus jerking back around when the nearest adult’s hand clamps down on his shoulder, but Felix wriggling to stay just out of range. Their eyes hold, for a minute. She gives him a Fitzpatrick grin and then, just before an elbow knocks him sideways, switches to a wide sweet mother-Mary smile.

At eleven she gets her growth spurt and suddenly towers above everyone, even lanky Felix Toombs. Sunday mornings find her looking down at his cowlick, a spiral to the left that matches the swirls in the hand-carved ends to the pew. Each week she works on holding still, she’s a young lady now and the tolerance for diversions is long gone. She knots her fingers together and thinks how someone must make Felix damp his unruly hair and comb it flat, it doesn’t look like that at school; someone folds over that shirt collar so that it will stay there, no matter how he fidgets and slumps with a boy’s freedom during the service. But the Toombs brothers always show up with the Orozcos, and the Sunday morning whispers say their mother is gone. Gone like Fitzpatricks, she wonders,  _gone for a while_ , a new excuse every holiday from aunts who thought she’s never heard of jail? She always cuts off her curiosity right there, distracts herself instead by meeting the gaze of each woodcut martyr on the wall. No point in listening to the sermon, when the priest eats dinner at her house with the worst sinners in his flock. She’s heard it all before.

When they are thirteen Felix gets his own growth spurt and Molly is suddenly eye level with his shoulders, at first narrow and restless, then growing rapidly wide and still as, she’ll think later, new muscles bound him into place. Now it’s just an eerie transformation to match her own, and she wonders if it feels like a trap closing in on him, too. She lost her first race out behind the bar in August, that year, to some still-skinny bitch from Pan High. Bent over wheezing with her hands on her shaking, traitorous quads, she was trying to figure out what had just happened when she heard the voice. "They grow hips, they slow down." She whipped upwards in time to see Liam smack Danny Boyd so hard he crashed into the keg table:  _good_. But for once, her uncle didn’t return her thank-you grin: Liam’s eyes raked over her, his mouth pressed into a thin, hard, line.

When they are fifteen Gus Toombs disappears and Felix misses church for the first time in years. She stares at the empty pew, thinking of how Liam’s temper had flared and fizzled to smugness, these last weeks, how money had been tight for a while and is back to rolling in. She thinks of paper footballs and half-smiles in study hall, stiff collars and gone-for-a-while; she looks at the martyrs and her dry eyes burn. When they come home to news of the bar on fire, she makes excuses and runs upstairs, escapes the inferno of incredulous family feuding to hide under the covers and laugh until she can finally, finally cry.

Felix stops meeting her eyes in study hall, but when Wanda Varner turns him in for sign-stealing, Molly punches her anyway. It’s a matter of principle. And when Thumper Orozco shows up in the same detention, his surprised glance becoming a too-knowing leer, she ignores it. She’s never cared what the PCHers thought before.

When they are sixteen, Thumper trips her coming back from communion and she falls right into Felix, crammed into the too-small bench behind the Orozcos. He stands to catch her, unfolding so smoothly as she careens into him that she’s back upright before anyone even notices the stir. No one sees his eyes widen, or the clutch of his hands against her hip and her shoulder, how tightly he grips her for the moment that their faces are too close. Like they were interrupted waltzing, she might think, if her uncle hadn’t killed his brother, and if she were the type of person who ever had thoughts that soft. She keeps her eyes on his as they untangle and thinks about nothing at all.

Maybe she scans her closet for too long the next Sunday, still not thinking, but in the end she shakes her head and wears what she always wears. So it feels like any ordinary Mass until she opens her hymnal to find a paper football. It unfolds to a sketch, smudged but recognizable, of the oldest monument in the cemetery. Her eyes drop to the question underneath: _Tonight?_

 _Midnight,_  she writes, with the stubby pencil that certainly wasn’t provided for this. She refolds it, waits for her uncle to look left, and flicks it over the pew.

***

At first it’s horrible, her granite mob-daughter defenses shredded like tissue paper after one second, one touch, one look. Ten years of easy inattention and suddenly when Felix dog-ears a page, frowning down at the hymnbook like he always has, the sight of the edge rolling between his fingers has her panting between _glorias_. It’s unfair, and obscene, and she wants to know what that feels like.

He figures it out, of course, and the transformation from a struggle to a game only deepens the haze of her newfound stupidity. If he never turns a page quickly again, she can at least graze his shoulder with her nails as she stands for the anthem, earn a shudder in return. They are going to get caught, killed, and sent to Hell, no question. Watching Felix kneel and tip his head back for communion, Molly can’t bring herself to care.

Once they actually fuck, it gets better. But then it stops being just fucking, and it’s much, much worse.

When they’ve been together for three months, he starts to recognize the face she makes when she bites back words in history, or study hall; she knows the quirk of his eyebrows that means she has just made it. She can't believe he remembers, sometimes, but every Sunday afternoon he surprises her: Wednesday, he says and she explodes. _Manifest Destiny was such bullshit._  

She starts to rely on it, the way he makes her say things, delighting in them, taking in every angry word she swallows around the rest of the people in her life. It’s easier to be quiet all week when she knows she'll have those minutes of shaking against his hands, the rage melting into laughter as he whispers, _no tell me what you really think, baby_. She does, too, tell him everything, except for this: that she’s started thinking she might need him. It’s a terrible idea, more dangerous than the notes on the gravestones or even his mouth on her underneath the bar. She isn’t going to give it momentum by saying it aloud.

They’ve been together for five months when he tells her about trucking school, forty grand and any state they want, open roads and air-conditioned cabs, with _I know how you like small spaces_ slipped through his choirboy grin. She has to tackle him for that, and once they come up for air she almost tells him then. But he stays too close, his hands slide through her hair and her mouth has its own priorities. They are seventeen, and she’s mapped out all the boiler rooms and mop closets in Neptune; they've only met in half of them, and haven’t been caught in any. They have time.


End file.
